From the park I took Sasha home with me.  The presence of the beloved woman in one’s bachelor quarters affects one like wine and music.  Usually one begins to speak of the future, and the confidence and self-reliance with which one does so is beyond bounds.  You make plans and projects, talk fervently of the rank of general though you have not yet reached the rank of a lieutenant, and altogether you fire off such high-flown nonsense that your listener must have a great deal of love and ignorance of life to assent to it.  Fortunately for men, women in love are always blinded by their feelings and never know anything of life.  Far from not assenting, they actually turn pale with holy awe, are full of reverence and hang greedily on the maniac’s words.  Sasha listened to me with attention, but I soon detected an absent-minded expression on her face, she did not understand me.  The future of which I talked interested her only in its external aspect and I was wasting time in displaying my plans and projects before her.  She was keenly interested in knowing which would be her room, what paper she would have in the room, why I had an upright piano instead of a grand piano, and so on.  She examined carefully all the little things on my table, looked at the photographs, sniffed at the bottles, peeled the old stamps off the envelopes, saying she wanted them for something.

“Please collect old stamps for me!” she said, making a grave face.  “Please do.”

Then she found a nut in the window, noisily cracked it and ate it.

“Why don’t you stick little labels on the backs of your books?” she asked, taking a look at the bookcase.

“What for?”

“Oh, so that each book should have its number.  And where am I to put my books?  I’ve got books too, you know.”

“What books have you got?” I asked.

Sasha raised her eyebrows, thought a moment and said: 

“All sorts.”

And if it had entered my head to ask her what thoughts, what convictions, what aims she had, she would no doubt have raised her eyebrows, thought a minute, and have said in the same way:  “All sorts.”

Later I saw Sasha home and left her house regularly, officially engaged, and was so reckoned till our wedding.  If the reader will allow me to judge merely from my personal experience, I maintain that to be engaged is very dreary, far more so than to be a husband or nothing at all.  An engaged man is neither one thing nor the other, he has left one side of the river and not reached the other, he is not married and yet he can’t be said to be a bachelor, but is in something not unlike the condition of the porter whom I have mentioned above.